For this firm, bitcoin is more attractive than weed

The founders of Seed CX are jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon and dumping their plans for a platform that would trade exotic commodities like hemp.

The two young Chicago entrepreneurs behind Seed CX—Edward Woodford and Brian Liston—are pivoting to trade cryptocurrency derivatives on their platform, pending regulatory approvals, said Woodford, the company's CEO.

The shift was announced in conjunction with a statement today from Seed CX that U.S.-based cryptocurrency platform Bittrex acquired a majority stake in the company. Woodford declined to disclose how much was invested.

Bittrex, which has 2 million customers trading $3 billion in cryptocurrencies daily, according to the statement, will send customers seeking to trade cryptocurrency derivatives to Seed CX's Seed SEF unit, which previously won regulatory approval as a swaps execution facility, and to a new subsidiary called Seed Market. The Seed exchanges will in turn flow customers to Bittrex, though the two platforms won't directly connect and Seed aims to cater to larger clients.

The Bittrex and Seed businesses will operate separately, Woodford said.

In August, Woodford, 24, and Liston, 25, sold an unlaunched futures trading subsidiary, Seed Futures, to Dough, which operates a Chicago trading brokerage and online media outlet. The MIT grads had raised $4.5 million to fund a startup they hoped would one day trade industrial hemp as well as other commodities like avocados and limes. Of that former enterprise, Woodford said only that the "market has not developed sufficiently."